Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Last week, we had a discussion in my writing instruction class about how to give good comments on student papers. The instructor asked everyone to write down the best and worst comments (we interpreted it as helpful and least helpful lest the exercise devolve into boasting and masochism) they ever received on their writing. She explained one of the all-time weirdest: a student several years ago reported receiving a graded paper with the word PEDESTRIAN rubber-stamped on it. That can't be true, can it?

Least helpful and strangest comments I've received:

*"Witty, well-written, thoughtful. It's better than I thought it would be."

*"Your work is a black diamondbeautifuland rare" (one of my professors used to write comments in free verse)

*(upon hearing I got annoyed and couldn't make it through Roland Barthes' Fragments of a Lovers' Discourse): "You just need to be slapped around ... [too, too long pause] by structuralism."

One of the most helpful comments I received in college was from a professor who drew up a diagram of what close-reading paragraphs tend to look like. My big ideas ended up at the ends of my paragraphs because I was developing them as I wrote--a fine generative process for first drafts--but I needed to make my arguments at the beginnings of paragraphs and use the close reading as evidence rather than build-up. I kept that diagram on my desk for years. The bigger-picture version of that tendency is the student who gets to the point in the final paragraphs of an essay (or column, when I was editing those).

Not only is this useful advice for a critic, it's also valuable for teachers to remember in writing comments. Of course, no teacher tries to rack up style points in an essay comment the way a book critic does in a review, but I try to focus most of my comments on that work of distinguishing and diagnosing.